Measuring Research Impact: Author IDs and Profiles

Author Identifiers - Distinguish Yourself!

Author identifiers are meant to help with author name disambiguation. In order to measure your impact as an author, you want to be sure you get credit for all your research output. Publishing under variations of your name, having a common name, changing your name, changing institutions - all of these can lead to your work being incorrectly associated with another author, or you can end up with several author profiles. As a solution, register for an ORCID identifier, then associate it with your ResearcherID, Scopus profile, My NCBI account, etc. The boxes on this page explain how to do this.

ORCID

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a persistent digital identifier for researchers. Registering for an ORCID identifier is free and easy. Once you have your unique ORCID identifier, you can create a profile and/or link it to your other author IDs and profiles (e.g., ResearcherID, My NCBI, LinkedIn). You can associate existing publications with your ORCID profile by importing from sources like Scopus and Web of Science. Going forward, use your ORCID identifier in all stages of your research workflow (grant applications, manuscript submissions, etc.) to make sure that you get credit for your work.

Scopus Author Identifier

Scopus automatically generates an author identifier for authors in the Scopus database and attempts to disambiguate authors and build an author profile. Citation metrics are included with each author profile. You cannot edit your author profile yourself, but you can request corrections if publications are incorrectly assigned (or missing from) your profile or you find other errors.

ResearcherID

ResearcherID is integrated with the Web of Science database. Your ResearcherID facilitates citation metrics and publication tracking using Web of Science tools and includes you in the Web of Science author index. You can create an author profile in ResearcherID that allows other researchers to learn more about your work and affiliations.

Disambiguating Institutions

An author's Institutional affiliation(s) can be another source of confusion since an institution may have multiple name variations. Ringgold is trying to disambiguate institutions by assigning them unique IDs.